Bridging Global North and South: Rethinking Urbanization through Collaborative Design in Johannesburg
Contemporary African cities are experiencing rampant urbanization processes, occurring at unprecedented scales and speeds. Particularly since the 2020 pandemic, these phenomena have increasingly had a negative impact on urban life: from housing shortages to austerity policies, from fraying of the social fabric to environmental damage and rising inequality, the urban crisis resonates across nations and generations in places like South Africa.
Yet while the urgency of shaping these complicated urban environments is widely recognized, the skill set required to do so is often far removed from the educational training of built environment professionals. Planners, designers and policymakers have a responsibility to the citizens of this continent to respond to these critical conditions with appropriate and agile solutions. In Africa, as in so many other places around the globe, we must explore radical new tools, strategies and ways of thinking on how to address rapid urbanization with care and intentionality, in order to make African urban in a sustainable, just and equitable way.
One of the key issues we therefore face in our teaching, from South Africa to Liechtenstein, is transmitting the value of understanding broader social, political, and economic forces for design work, and developing the methods with which to assess this with and for students.
Johannesburg is a fascinating place from which to theorize: it has always been the “quintessential apartheid city” (known as) where urban poor are relegated on the urban scale as well as the national scale (homelands). Today, people’s options are constrained by the geography the city-region: colonial and apartheid legacies of spatial planning as well as market forces limit where people can live.
Each semester, Prof. Lindsay Blair Howe leads a design studio engaging with methods of urban research for the Liechtenstein School of Architecture (LSA). Once a year, in the fall, she brings a cohort of students to Johannesburg, in order to simultaneously advance research pursuits and the education of young, primarily European, architecture students. The expectation is for students to conceive of a project based on utilizing the qualitative, primarily ethnographic, research methods our posters describe.
The students are invited to participate in a “seminar week”, in which they travel from their home base in Vaduz, Liechtenstein, to Johannesburg, South Africa. They are expected to use urban research methods to grasp how people shape their own environments. For two semesters, we have engaged with the centrally-located neighborhood of Bertrams, east of the famous Ellis Park Stadium in central Johannesburg. “Makers Valley” was our particular focus for the 2023 and 2024 semesters that spanned across our collaboration. In this space, artists, practitioners, urban gardeners, carpenters, shoemakers, designers, and many others, live and work. We engaged with its evolving community culture, identifying forms of creativity, sharing, giving, learning, participation and positive change – and imagined how we might translate this into urban and architectural design.
Prof. Howe runs the studio with her long-term local collaborators Dr. Tanya Zack (University of the Witwatersrand) and Thireshen Govender (UrbanWorks Architecture & Urbanism), who have deep knowledge of Johannesburg from a policy, social and spatial perspective. As collaborators on this exercise, they provided a sharp framing of the site relative to the teaching outcomes. This specialist collaboration allowed the students to gain insightful knowledge very quickly, and allowed for a refined conversation as to what is possible within the architectural and urbanism tools available.
A network of other institutions and partners were also made available to complement existing insight, from local government officials to other researchers and academics, as well as artists and local people living on the site. Students were able to make sense of how the policy and institutional arrangements of the state inform lived realities in Bertrams. This experience collapsed the more traditional site of learning, instead expanding the classroom into boardrooms, streets, yards and kitchens. Collectively, as instructors, we argue that, in order to develop new methods and policies, we also need to invent new forms of teaching and research. Through this collaborative studio work, we identified a set of five tools that we think helps to bridge these gaps, through research and teaching and engaged scholarship: immersion, conversation, storytelling, data, and imagination.
In this way, as a team, we sought to bridge across what has become spoken about in the academy as the Global North and South. How we utilize methods of urban research not only to make theories about how the built environment around us is produced, but explore what that means for people, and how we can use these understandings to imagine a future together. As our exhibition that we produced together with the Embassy of Switzerland and Liechtenstein in South Africa, and the panel discussion we conducted as a conclusion to disseminate these two years of work culminating at the South African Science Forum (SFSA) in December 2024.
We aim to counter the tendency to treat “Africa” as an object of study, but not of knowledge production – which remains pervasive at universities of the West. The broader findings of the work we do together has also led us to question what we term the “myth of infrastructure”: the blanket provision of capital-intensive and globally-oriented projects. Instead, we purport conceiving of policies and programs through a deep understanding of people’s everyday lives and choices, which we find by observing how they navigate and negotiate the urban.
We believe that meaningful collaboration across the Global North and South is possible, if we base our methods and approaches in such everyday social realities. All of our findings pose a chance to make life better – or make life worse – for real people. Understanding people and places is therefore paramount to the successful implementation of development policies and programs, as is cross-cultural collaboration and interaction with students. It is only by coming together that we can tackle the most urgent problems of making an urban Africa, and everywhere else too.
“The relationship between the Global North-South has been fraught with tension due to its extractive and asymmetrical relationships favouring the Global North. The Bertrams studio is an important exercise in reconciling these tensions and working in a critical and sensitive manner around knowledge flows. It seeks to carefully position issues, histories and cultures between these extremes through a teaching studio seeking more reciprocity.
The studio reconciles historical polarities in a nuanced, sensitive, and critical manner to explore new sites and terms of learning and engagement.
As a co-tutor, I'm appreciative of the enthusiasm, curiosity and empathy that the students have engaged the subject matter. I trust this experience to a relatively wildly other world it will serve them well in their professional and personal lives.
I would like to thank Prof. Lindsay Blair Howe for her commitment and care in creating this experience for students and partners. The work has been incredibly generative in asking more questions and prompting new enquiries.”
Thireshen Govender
UrbanWorks Principal & African Futures Institute (AFI) “Nomadic Studio” Tutor
“In the Bertrams studio, students embraced the opportunity to learn from a foreign context and to respond sensitively to the local conditions. This required careful listening and observation as well as acute spatial analysis and design. The outcomes they produced were of a very high standard and some were even masterful. Most importantly were their own words about the experience being 'inspirational', 'mind opening' and even 'life-changing'.”
Dr. Tanya Zack
University of the Witwatersrand
